Autumn:
25
John spends the evening nursing a glass of Chardonnay and thinking about how he'll approach Molly, about what she might know. He decides that perhaps Sherlock has confided another manila envelope to her, to give to him, at the right time.
The next morning John finds himself in a cold sweat of anticipation. He catches sight of his reflection in the window of the bus. His eyes are shining, pupils dilated wildly. John sways, dangling from a cliff of awakenings.
Other passengers sidle away from him.
Arriving at St Barts, he pokes his head around the door of the lab without knocking.
Molly is standing, still, looking out of the window into the car park.
"Hello, John."
She turns, slowly. Something about her looks ... different. The usual eager, bright Molly has vanished, replaced by a tense and vigilant gaze. And, though she is looking at John and offering a concerned smile, part of her is ... elsewhere. As if there is an alarm ringing somewhere in the building, that John can't hear.
John smiles back, unsure.Molly is one of the good folk, he reminds himself,nothing to worry about here.
"Hi," he ventures a little wave, "Sorry, it's been ages, hasn't it? How are you?"
"Tolerably well," her tight, distracted expression doesn't change – she's looking somewhere over John's right shoulder, "Industrious. Persevering."
She takes a breath as if to speak again, stops, frowns. "Um … how's the head?" She looks confused at her own question, then enlightened, "the head in the fridge! I lent it to Sherlock. Against my better – oh! Yes. How is it?"
John shakes his head, utterly bewildered, "Mycroft's men cleared it out. It was getting rather, you know, rotten."
Molly looks faintly ill at this, but nonetheless says, "Surely that was the point!"
John takes a step forward, "Molly, are you OK?"
"I'm fine!" She holds out her arm as a barrier, " But I'd feel a damn bit better if you refrained from drinking an entire vineyard every weekend, and took a bit more care of yourself. Look at you!"
John's stunned, "I didn't know you … cared, so much. Wait, how did you know that?"
Molly pauses for a long while. When she speaks, her voice is blank, almost disembodied from her self,
"John, I care more than you can know."
They stand in silence. Molly's posture has deflated, as if someone has cut her strings. She looks at John sadly, her brow creased in sympathy. John's not entirely sure what's going on, but he's going to get what he came for.
He clears his throat, "Sherlock. He left me a note. It said, 'Ask Molly'. Have you any idea what that means?"
Twisting the hem of her lab coat in her hands, Molly shrugs, "No, I'm afraid. Before … it happened. Before, he was here and said he was worried something was going to happen to him. Not really news, though, that."
John nods, "And that's all?"
"Sorry," She sounds miserable, "I wish I could give you the answers that you deserve." John watches her closely. Not a flicker. He rubs his eyes, exhausted suddenly.
"Bye then," John reaches for the door handle. Molly's staring over his right shoulder again,
"A bientot, John."
He shuts the door.
John decides to walk home. What had he been hoping for? What, exactly?
He kicks the fallen leaves that rustle round his ankles in a russet tide, crushing them underfoot.
26
John spends the next few days worrying about Molly.
Her distracted gaze reminds him of a spaniel listening for rabbits in a field, staring off into the middle distance, head cocked, leg bent. That was Molly.
He'd thought that she'd been talking. She hadn't. She'd been listening.
John thought about the sounds in the room: the soft hum of the equipment, the typing of keyboards. Nothing.
He paces the living room. The phone rings,
"John, hi,"
It's Molly.
"How are you?"
He's silent.
"John, this is just ... to apologise, about last week. I wasn't feeling very well, bit distracted, no sleep, too much coffee. Woo. Look, I know you want Sherlock back, we all do, believe me, but ... he's dead. John?"
John bites his lip. Puts the phone down.
Of course. Dead. He's going crazy. He saw Sherlock, dead, head impossibly crushed, hair stuck to the pavement by his heavy blood.
He doesn't cry. He's beyond it, now.
27
On his birthday John wakes up early, eager, and gives himself another of Sherlock's slips of paper as a present.
He settles cross-legged on Sherlock's bed, opening it slowly, with careful fingers.
'Dear John,
Isn't it strange, to be writing you a 'Dear John' letter, when I mean quite the opposite?
Today, I have been reading Aeschylus , and thinking about heroes.
I have come to the conclusion that you are a hero. Brave, non-conventional, thick. Apologies for the latter, but it is a recognised character trait. Look at Achilles.
I imagine you believe, now, that life isn't really heroic. That it's rather tragic. This is true.
But today, the sun is shining.'
John pauses, looks out of the window. It is indeed. He reads on.
'And that's important. I believe in pathetic fallacy. Thus, if the sun is shining you have an obligation to follow it, to happiness. Particularly today.'
John gasps. No, today, how could it - shaking his head, he skims the rest of the letter.
'Another conclusion I have come to, recently, is that expressing one's emotions does not make one ... weak, or hysterical. I've found that once one gives in, emotion becomes seductive. A shrieking heart in an unwholesome beast.
I'm enjoying it.
And there, John, endeth the lesson. Blow out the candles.
Yours ever,
SH'
John is not a conspiracy theorist, and he's sure he's half-mad through grief and loneliness. Spectre Sherlock confirms this, every Saturday night.
But this. He reads the note again. Too much, too much to be coincidence, to be anything but a message. Sherlock may have taken formal leave of life but somehow, he has been snatched from the stormcloud of Moriarty's insanity.
John crumples the paper in his fist. Stands. He's galvanized, jaw set grimly.
Elated, and enraged.
28
Let me not notice all around the dying leaves fall.
John has been looking for signs, everywhere he goes. He's a tracker dog, following any scent that seems fruitful.
Molly. He visits her every day, at different times. Sits in the corner of the lab, or the morgue, arms folded, and watches her.
At first, she's visibly freaked out by this, but soon she's making him a cup of tea and plonking a couple of garibaldi biscuits on a napkin in front of him.
"Just keep out of the way, then."
She picks up a saw and begins to separate a man's sternum.
John coughs, trying not to gag, "It's like woodwork at school."
Molly grins, "Yep. But more fun."
John soon abandons this line of enquiry. Molly is clearly back to whatever passes as 'normal' in her world. Whatever was going on that first day, it has passed.
John lurks in the cemetery rather a lot. He knows not why - perhaps if Sherlock's grave is here, so too is Sherlock? He doesn't get much detective work done, however, as he's almost magnetically drawn to Sherlock's grave.
"Morning, Sherlock. Still here?"
He feels much brighter, with purpose. Strange, he thinks, in more lucid moments, to at once believe and disbelieve that Sherlock is dead.
If hell exists on earth this must be it. This purgatory of love and loss, the endless search as the leaves of autumn scuttle up to his halting feet, struck into burned brown and ochre by an early frost. Stripped from umbilical cords to skate across the pavements.
They host upon his shoes as if including John in their great fall, and he cannot participate in their game. He has already found a place to hide and decompose.
With time, with each increasingly stiff clamber up the long enneads of stairs to his cold and empty-aired flat, his hope declines.
John plants bulbs at Sherlock's grave. He can't pass this task in silent dignity or cheerful, bloodless banter.
He sweats and grunts, corporeal, and mocks his own figure in it's textbook pastoral pose, tending the grave. He realises he has met grief face to face, and lost.
29
John is so absorbed in his copy of the Metro that he doesn't hear the assassin until the bone-marrow needle syringe its fang through the shoulder of his jumper.
It jars horribly against the tough trunk of his scapula, and John's back spasms violently. He shudders, screamless, mouth agape as empty brightness falls behind his eyelids and pain ruptures across his back.
Darkness falls, inside John, rises silently up his spine, up to the last floor, his brain. A jar of mustard smashes against the pavement as limp fingers lose his shopping.
When he wakes, John is staring into the ear of a young male nurse, who is wiping at his shoulder with stinking antiseptic.
His quiet words nick John like a razor, scything into his sedated ears. His flat and soothing voice, the lazy notes of reassurance,
"You're awake, good ... is it hurting?" His eyes are kind, so sympathetic.
John has enough energy to nod.
"I'll crank up the morphine."
John gurgles, what might be a thank you, shredded through his tongue.
"You're lucky to be alive. A bloke fended off your attacker before he could get too much poison into you. He called an ambulance, stayed with you til it came. Kept your heart beating."
John's eyes roll wildly, he croaks, trying to ask who, who saved me? It comes out as a dull whimper.
The nurse smiles, and leaves.
John watches the shadows, tasting rusty blood in the back of his throat. He's alive. Alone, tormented, but alive. This might break warmer souls, who need sympathy and wide smiles, and gestures of love.
But now, John is beyond life's petty goals. Bowed down, bent low, but never, ever broken. A baby can survive outside the womb at 29 weeks. So too, John thinks, can I.
The police come to take his statement. John draws in a deep, firm breath, and sits up.
30
John is discharged from the hospital after a week. He's sick of the stink of antiseptic and the relentless cheer of the staff, keen to get back to his safe routine of morning walks, reading and visiting Sherlock's grave.
He stumbles out of the cab, catching his toe on the lip of the pavement. Looks up at 221B. Sighs.
As he opens the door, John notices an envelope wedged in the letterbox. Exhausted, he doesn't even think as he opens it.
A syringe.
"God!"
It falls from his hands and clatters to the floor. John stares at it, panting.
Then he notices it, a tag around the plunger, a small note. He peers at it,
"Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay To change your day of youth to sullied night;
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new."
John unwraps the tag, which he pockets. He picks up the syringe in his thumb and forefinger, and flings it in the rubbish bin.
Looks up and down the quiet street. Nothing, just a tabby cat sidling along the opposite side, pressed against the wall.
Inside, John sits and reads the note again.
It's Shakespeare.
Probably. Maybe Marlowe.
"Mmmm", John reads it again. He has just enough secondary school Shakespeare to get the gist ... "Where time fights with decay ... to change your youth to ... age? I'll fight time, I'll ...?"
John scowls,
"Well, thanks, that makes no sense."
Later on, awake in Sherlock's bed and reading the notes of an old, solved case, John looks up sharply, "Idiot. The syringe is a scalp. Not a threat. It's a scalp."
Clearly, someone is looking after John. John thinks of Mycroft and, in a moment of animal-instinct self preservation, stops thinking at all.
31
John may be stale in the heart but still, he doesn't want to die alone. He's aware that he isn't entirely broken. After all, Sherlock was a sociopath and he still managed to come to the conclusion that what most makes life worth living, is someone loving you.
Well, he might've been getting there.
Women like John. This one certainly does. They meet in Tesco, on one of his better days. The dull, deep ache in his shoulder has faded, and he's just put a (rare, admittedly) wash on, so is wearing crisp, fresh clothes.
Her name is Gilly. She's a Benefits Supervisor. John's not sure what that means, in real terms. Probably as much and as little as Consulting Detective.
32
33
34
John spends the next three weeks in a coma of Gilly.
They have dinner together, walk around Hyde Park. Gilly laughs at John's weak jokes. He kisses her, sometimes, briefly on the mouth. His lips tightly closed, and hard. It is no more and no less fulfilling than being alone - it simply requires that he doesn't break down and sob in her presence.
He wonders why she puts up with this; has she been used so badly in the past that his brand of non-violent abuse is acceptable to her? At least she's undemanding.
On Thursday afternoon he pops out to buy a pint of milk. He leaves Gilly in the living room, fiddling about with her phone. He's only gone five minutes, ten at most.
She's standing by the mantelpiece.
Immediately John's eyes flick to the envelope,
I hope you don't have a baby in here...
"What are you doing?"
She raises her eyes to John's, they're swollen and red with tears.
"Who is she?" she brandishes a piece of paper at him, waving it angrily, "Who is she? Your girlfriend? An ex? Who?"
John shakes his head, holds out his hand in demand, "Give me the letter. Give me, the bloody letter." He has no thought of embarrassment, of explanations, just knows that the letter is his, the memory is his, and she has no right to it.
"Tell me! I've been ... falling in love with you, and you - you -" she breaks off, beside herself, "I mean Jesus, I feel sick!"
She purses her lips. Raises her eyebrows. Holds up the paper and - voice vibrating with rage - begins to read in a stilted, halting voice.
'Dear John.
The greatest epiphany of my life is that I am starting to know happiness. Maybe for the first time. I feel warm, and (occasionally, when tired) kind and, yes, even rotund. Albeit spiritually.
I am too often pleased with myself, I know. My laughs like cackles are a reminder of where I have been, of how bad I have been. But I'm pleased with us. I'm pleased with who you have made me.
You are reading this because I'm gone, which puts a damper on that. I cannot cling desperately to hope because that would be unfair to both of us. It would prevent reality. I hear you. I understand. But equally I cannot destroy hope, inwardly or outwardly, because it would destroy myself.
I am not closing any of the myriad doors in this universe. I am bored of control. I am open to whatever is to come and I know I'll be surprised. I know I will remember the kindness you have taught me.
Yours Ever,
SH'
John looks up at the ceiling. His brimming eyes don't tremble or spill.
Then his voice like a deadly weapon, measured guillotine, easily delivers these last words to Gilly, standing before him snivelling, "Get. Out."
35
A voicemail from Lestrade:
'John, news! If you could call me back – oh, bollocks. John?
Sherlock's been acquitted. Finally, no appeals, he's in the clear. Isn't that wonderful?
Every single one of his cases was proved correct. God you can't believe how relieved - sorry, obviously not about me. But still, he'd be pleased, wouldn't he?'
A long pause.
'Well … that's all. See you, hopefully.'
John rolls over on the sofa, twisting his blanket around himself like a cocoon.
"Tell his grave."
36
It's raining, and John shakes a small shower of water from his parka as he arrives back at 221B. He enjoys the blooming blue smell of the rain, and has been wandering aimlessly around London for hours.
The entire house is still.
John fiddles with the radio, which sparks to life, delivering the low tones of Radio 4 into the gloom as he potters around.
Beans on toast, a poached egg, some paprika. He reads the paper as he eats, as a distraction. Later, he will pour himself a glass of wine, and watch the rain fall darkly on Baker Street.
Leaning his forehead against the window, he notices a tramp resting against a lamp post outside, bundled in coats, face obscured by a broad-rimmed hat. The man favours John with a nod, before moving on with surprisingly sprightly footsteps.
John pities him for a moment. Before realising that he is just as alone.